Professor Hilde De Weerdt and Post-doctoral Research Associate Hou Ieong/Brent Ho were successful in a joint international application for the transatlantic Digging into Data Challenge. The scheme is sponsored by the national research councils of Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

"Automating Data Extraction from Chinese Texts," one of the fourteen projects selected in this round, will develop a means of transforming texts written in classical Chinese into structured data. Project members will design an open-source platform (MARKUS) that allows researchers and students to apply sophisticated text analysis techniques to a wide variety of historical and literary texts. Users will be able to tag and extract personal names, dates, place names, official titles and postings, kinship ties, other social relationships, and other user-defined content. The platform will be tested against 2000 local histories spanning an 800-year period and roughly 20,000 letters and 500 notebooks dating from the seventh through the thirteenth century. Data extracted from the sample repositories will be made available for research through open-access online databases and data archives. The platform will also function as a reading platform for use in research and teaching, providing a range of online reference tools for classical Chinese texts.